Hephaestos

 

I must admit that Hephaestus is going to be a hard one for me. I long ago seem to have left my artistic sensibilities behind, and I do tend to see Hephaestus as an artist. A god who inspires us to achieve great beauty with even the most seemingly ugly of materials.

 

I was once an artistic type. I even did a stint in art school, but that was before the darkness took me and I struggled for years with almost debilitating depression and even suicidal tendencies. I still struggle, you see, with the pains in my head. Most are real, and some are imagined or postulated by my mind and held onto so that today I find myself wondering which were real and which were figments.

 

That my mind was thus tortured is not something I am proud of. I feel very often that if I had just been stronger I could have become something great, but that too is speculative imagination. There is no way to know such a thing, and besides, I wouldn't be me had my life gone different, and I have grown to rather like me, even if I still have tremendous issues with my ugly exterior.

 

But those artistic sensibilities make their way to the surface from time to time, thanks to Apollo, and in so much as I often make my living space a thing of beauty even with thrift store materials, I feel that Hephaestus is active in my life. Seeing what might come of a thing lacking in value or intrinsic beauty. Working beyond my own handicaps even as the god himself is said to do to bring something of beauty into being, even if it is only beautiful to me.

 

So there it is, the first lesson Hephaestos has taught me.